Abstract
I shall begin with the so-called problem plays, and in particular All’s Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida. The plays earn their soubriquet from Boas’ identification of them as Shavian dramas concerned with the woman question,1 but the name has stuck beyond that ephemeral occasion because the plays do present a genuine enigma. They do not fall easily into generic categories and they leave many auditors with a peculiar mixture of uncertainty and disgust.
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Chapter 1
Frederick S. Boas, Shakspere and His Predecessors ( London: John Murray, 1896 ) p. 27.
G. K. Hunter (ed.), All’s Well That Ends Well, New Arden edn (London and New York: Methuen, 1967 ).
G. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ and Its Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968).
Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabeth Drama ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954 ) pp. 212–14.
E. M. W. Tillyard, in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1950 ), p. 113.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch,in his Introduction to All’s Well That Ends Well (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929) p.xxxi
A. P. Rossiter, in Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey ( London: Longman, 1961 ) p. 87.
Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘The Nymph’s Reply’, in Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 ), p. 212.
C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959 ) p. 118.
W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) pp. 182–208. See esp. pp. 195–7.
Geoffrey Hill, ‘The Guardians’, For the Unfallen: Poems 1952–1958 ( London: André Deutsch, 1959 ) p. 40.
Peter Conrad, Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978 ) p. 9.
M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare’s History Plays ( London: Edward Arnold, 1961 ) pp. 255–6.
John Donne, ‘An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary’, 11. 205–13, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 ) p. 276.
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1981) esp. pp. 19–27, for a discussion of this concept.
Anne Barton, in Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984 ).
John Bayley, in Shakespeare and Tragedy (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) p. 81, finds Parolles ‘engagingly complacent’ here.
W. W. Lawrence, in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 ) pp. 59–61.
William Hazlitt, ‘All’s Well That Ends Wel’, The Round Table/Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, ed. Catherine Macdonald Maclean (London: Dent, repr. 1969 ) p. 329.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge on Shakespeare: A Selection of the Essays Notes and Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the Poems and Plays of Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 ) p. 277.
W. W. Skeat (ed.), Chaucerian and Other Pieces ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897 ) pp. 327–46.
John Bayley, The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968) pp. 86, 105–7.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd edn ( London: Oxford University Press, 1966 ) pp. 389–479.
Jean Racine, Bérénice, ed. Gabriel Spillebout ( Paris: Bordas, 1970 ).
John Pearson, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell ( London: Fontana, 1980 ) p. 417.
Robert Kimbrough, Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and Its Setting ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964 ) pp. 25–39.
Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 ) pp. 105–78.
John Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1976 ) p. 205.
R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare, the Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: From Satire to Celebration ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971 ) p. 58.
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn ( London: Faber and Faber, 1951 ) pp. 129–31.
Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson, 3rd Ed. ( New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971 ) p. 274.
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© 1988 Lachlan Mackinnon
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Mackinnon, L. (1988). Chapter 1. In: Shakespeare the Aesthete. Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09225-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09225-3_1
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